Hi! My son and I just picked up a 4x8 layout from a neighbor who was moving and there’s a high spot in one of the track sections on the side of the hill. It appears to be where two sections of track connect. The tracks are all glued down so I can’t figure out the best way to eliminate the trouble section.
Any recommendations or places where I look for solutions?
Thanks!
Kevin
I wouldn’t hold much hope for this, but you could try soaking the affected area with a mixture of 50/50 isopropyl alcohol and water, and then weighting the affected area to press the rails back to the same height as the others. It will have to be done carefully to keep from wetting too large an area, and to prevent damaging the surrounding materials, plus the subroadbed or supporting material. Perhaps use a dropper to wet an area about 2" in diameter, centred right on the affected spot and see if that softens over an hour or so. If not, you have not damaged much, and can still feel good about having to disrupt it all anyway when you go ahead and pry up the affected rails with a screw driver or a metal shim of some kind.
If the soaking and pressing works, good. If not, you’ll have to break the bond, carefully and patiently, separate the affected sections of track from their neighbours, and then replace them with new sections of track when you have assured yourself that what they will lie on is once again planed or sanded flat. It might be smart to seal the area with a thin lacquer before you reglue just to keep moisture and humidity problems at bay in that spot. If the previous owner used ballast that was glued, then re-gluing may lift the wood all over again…I am assuming it is wood.
I don’t know if this is reassuring or at all helpful, but I would lean towards the tougher and longer job being the way to go.
Welcome to the forum, by the way.
Can you post a close-up picture?
As Selector said, it’s probably a warped wood problem. One thing you might be able to do is take a Dremel tool and cut through the rails and rail joiners at that point. By making a very narrow cut, you might relieve the pressure that’s forcing the rails up. This will break electrical connectivity at that point, though, so you probably should plan on installing jumper wires to route power around the gap, unless the track is already installed with a bus-and-feeder arrangement so you’ve already got good power distribution.
This should work OK with sectional track, but I wouldn’t expect it to be successful with flex-track. The flex track will want to straighten itself out if you cut it on a curve like this.
If it’s warped wood, the only solution I can see is to remove the track as stated above and make sure that the area is flat the relay the track. If however, the problem is that the two track sections have been pushed together so much that they buckled, you will still have to pull them up and remove a very small length of rail from the end of one section. I had a problem like that once and had to trim off almost an 8th of an inch to get the track to lay flat.
Ok… I went to take some pictures last night and noticed something… the two high spots that I have are about two track sections away on the same line. I’m thinking that I can remove the two, build up the middle slightly and that’ll eliminate the high spots. Sure sounds alot easier in concept than sanding it down since I’ll be working in very close quarters.
I’ve got the pictures downloaded on another computer and will review how to load them to shutterfly or something over the weekend. Its very difficult to see the individual spots but when you look at the overall section, you can see how it looks like the line may have sagged slightly when the person built the track many years ago.
Either way, it’ll be a fun weekend to be in the garage with my 8-yr old working on it. Now if only he’d be able to do the work and I could watch…
Thanks for the recommendation to snap the shots - it sure helped identify the solution!
Kevin